CHASTITY

'Chastity demands personal and total commitment. It requires a brave, patient and tenacious decision to go against the social and intellectual tide, to face the double burden of an loneliness that having no partner implies. It must be embraced, not simply tolerated. It entails the proactive - and in our emotionally starving age - prophetic attempt to refound community. Where there are difficulties in finding love and affection, they can be addressed. Chastity is not itself the issue. Chastity clarifies what the real issues are, both in self and society.' 

Jenny Taylor, A Wild Constraint, p.156. 

CHASTITY

'To be chaste is to embrace the fullness of our creativity and our Christian discipleship, and to refocus them. What is essential is a changed perception of oneself and one's meaning - and for that there is no alternative to a daily reckoning with oneself. Chastity is a form of poverty that is foundational to spiritual growth. It is an aridity that cleanses the doors of perception and helps one begin to see God and his purposes.' 

Jenny Taylor, A Wild Constraint, p.145. 

COMMUNITY

'True community implies difference. A group of identikit people is not a community, it is a regiment.' 

Jenny Taylor, A Wild Constraint, p.69.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

'Over the last century, in the pursuit of happiness, a trade-off has taken place between the cultural goods and safety of civilization and the pleasures of individual sexual licence. And we have called it science. We have deemed it obligatory to put up with a degree of sexual anarchy in the name of a spurious account of mental health, against the evidence of history, even though it endangers our very lives in community.

Modern people, particularly the young, are caught between peer-driven, scientistically legitimated and educationally imperatives of sexual activity - and the truth of their real feelings. What they feel does not match what they're being told to feel - but instead of trusting their feelings, they disavow those feelings, believing them still to be attached to values they are taught to believe are outmoded, patriarchal and very dangerous. Those values are Christian.' 

Jenny Taylor, A Wild Constraint, p.37. 

CHASTITY

'Chastity properly understood is an attitude that anticipates grace; that accepts there is a time and a place for all things. Learning how to wait well is the secret of maturity and satisfaction, even if it's for a lifetime.' 

Jenny Taylor, Wild Constraint: The Case for Chastity, p.4.